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Evening Standard
21 March 2005
Saving a Language with Chutzpah
by Norman Lebrecht
Outwitting History by Aaron Lansky (Souvenir Press)
Words on Fire by Dovid Katz (Basic Books)
SEVERAL European languages – Finnish, Irish, Welsh, Catalan – returned
to life in the 19th century, and one began to die. Yiddish was the vernacular
of Ashkenazic Jews, a hybrid of Hebrew, Aramaic and Middle High German that
took on words and syntax from Polish, Lithuanian, and Russian as Jews were pushed
ever further eastwards.
Dismissed by its own definition as mere "jargon", Yiddish nevertheless
gave rise to a voluminous literature for an avid readership. A minor novel by
Isaac-Meir Dik sold 120,000 copies in 1857. Sholem Aleichem, I. L. Peretz and
Mendele Moykher Sforim (Mendele the Bookseller) became bestsellers in the new
American diaspora.
Mass migration, however, resulted in Yiddish being discarded for melting pot English. The return-to-Zion movement in Russia replaced Yiddish with biblical Hebrew. Finally, Hitler struck a fatal blow to the language, wiping out millions of native speakers. When Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Nobel Prize in 1978, the award was seen as an epitaph to his mother tongue. "Yiddish has not yet said its last word," protested Singer, but few believed it would last much longer.
A student at the University of Massachusetts, Aaron Lansky by name, took a course in Yiddish in the 1970s and had trouble finding set books. A trip to New York's Lower East Side revealed cellars full of mildewed classics. Lansky made it his life's mission to rescue Yiddish books.
This was a counter-cultural obsession, verging on the quixotic. America is a country that never looks back. The only people still using Yiddish, apart from the very old, were the ultra-orthodox who despised the secular and socialist books that Lansky sought and a clutch of Jewish hippies like the 1968 Chicago defendant Abbie Hoffman, who used fishwife Yiddish to abuse a starch-collared Judge Hoffman.
The idea of Yiddish as a subversive tongue, resistant to English linguistic
imperialism and the Zionist vision of Israel for all Jews, was exhilarating
to Lansky and friends. They would leap up in the middle of the night and drive
200 miles to rescue a club library, or a publisher's stock, that had been dumped
on a skip in the rain.
Lansky issued appeals for books in dying Yiddish newspapers and recruited a
network of "zamlers" who collected for him all over the country, and
deep into South America. The result was a million and a half volumes gathered
into a National Yiddish Book Center in Massachusetts and distributed, on demand,
to university libraries in 26 countries. The hoard included much romantic drivel
and many duplicate copies; in all, Lansky counted no more than 35,000 individual
titles.
Some of the books, it turned out, were of great scholarly value and scarcity. A Yiddish dictionary of political terms, published in Kiev in 1929 and hidden by the author's cousin, was the only copy to survive Stalin's order to pulp the entire print run. Others contained the earliest firsthand Holocaust testimonies.
To create the centre, Lansky raised millions of dollars from sources as celebrated as Steven Spielberg. He is now engaged in scanning the more interesting titles on to the centre's website and translating others for English publication. He must be a marvel on the after dinner circuit for the stories he relates here veer calculatedly from laughter to tears. One of the funniest is his attempt to deliver a fundraiser at a Catskills hotel, only to earn himself a booking as an entertainer for the Jewish holidays.
Lansky maintains that Yiddish is on the way back, a faith shared by Dovid Katz who used to teach the language at Oxford and now heads an institute in Vilnius.
Katz's book, subtitled "The Unfinished Story of Yiddish", is the sadder of the two. His father, Menke Katz, was a famous Yiddish poet – famous, that is, to the few who knew Yiddish and read poetry.
Much of the story of the language involves factional feuding among literary minorities within this linguistic minority. Their claim of a Yiddish revival smacks to me of wishful thinking. The only growth I see is among Hassidic Jews, whose fundamentalist outlook keeps their vocabulary and verbal imagery within very narrow thought lines.
Still, never say die. No matter how little Yiddish is still spoken, a hundred
words survive in everyday English speech – from schmooze, to schmuck, to
nosh.